What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew coming to you with another episode of The Founders Journal.

My audio diary made public for the world that talks about the biggest moments, challenges, wins, all of the most important things happening behind the scenes at Morning Brew.

Today's episode is about strategic likeability before we get into it.

Just so you know, this is me riding solo today.

Normally, my producer and Human Swiss Army knife, Josh Kaplan, is along for the ride, but today he's working on the big brother or big sister of the founders journal which is business casual if you haven't checked out

business casual that is morning bruise flagship podcast where kensie

grant our host interviews the biggest names in business ranging from Mark Cuban to Reed Hastings, Meg Whitman, the list goes on.

Let's hop into this episode.

So I was having a a lot about the future of media and he's just overall a really interesting person to talk to and

understand where he believes the industry is going.

And he brought up this phrase that I hadn't heard before when talking about what it takes to succeed

within a media company and specifically as a senior person at a media company and he was just talking through his own experience.

And the phrase he used was strategic likeability. I never heard the phrase before and

candidly it sounded a little bit jargony to me but once he explained it I think it

made so much sense. So the way that I understood strategic likeability is it is

an employee's ability to have the trust and respect of employees at a company cross-functionally.

And I think this cross-functional piece is really important, right?

Because as you become more senior in a company, not only are you managing more people,

but you are also interfacing with other employees in other organizations within the broader company.

That's a really important point. And so it made me reflect on how, you know, we as professionals spend so much time thinking about how to be better performers.

When generally we think about being better performers, we focus on mostly hard skills, sometimes

soft skills, but we never really think about like the EQ part of the equation that drives

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